Lindsay Clancy told doctors she drank five days a week and had severe insomnia and suicidal thoughts — but claimed she wouldn’t 𝘬iᩚll herself because of her children — before she ended up fatally strangling them, in court Friday.
Just two days before the three little kids’ horrific slayings Jan. 24, 2023, the Mᴀssachusetts mom went with her husband and children to a friend’s barbecue and the pal, Sarah Carney, testified.
Plymouth prosecutors, in a chilling moment, asked Carney at one point if she ever saw the kids playing with the exercise bands that their mother, a 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, would soon 𝘬ill them with.
Lindsay Clancy told doctors she would never harm her family days before she strangled her three children, according to court testimony.AP
“Sure, if that’s what I said. I don’t recall,” Carney replied, referring to a social-media exchange over some of Clancy’s video posts showing the doomed kids playing around with the exercise cords.
In another tense moment, Clancy’s fuming lawyer told the judge that a prosecutor with jurors in the room Thursday saying, “Shut her up’’ as the 𝘬iᩚller mom wailed when autopsy pH๏τos were shown of her baby in court.
Clancy lawyer Kevin Reddington protested over the incident to Judge William Sullivan while jurors were still out from a break.
“They got picked up on a H๏τ mic saying ‘Shut her up,’ during the playing of the autopsy,” Reddington said of the alleged incident, demanding a sidebar.
It wasn’t clear who the “her’’ was that the lawyer was referring to, but Reddington was apparently suggesting the timing meant it was Clancy, and the judge agreed to a sidebar.
The new revelations about the horror case surfaced Friday as prosecutors before the slayings — additionally with a string of doctors who testified as Clancy тιԍнтly clasped her hands in front of her.
Clancy claimed that despite having severe insomnia and suicidal thoughts, she wouldn’t 𝘬iᩚll her children because of her mєntal state leading up to the murders.AP
Her lawyer wants a jury to find Clancy not guilty of her children’s killings by reason of insanity on the grounds she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, partly caused by the drugs she was on.
She had been given 30 prescriptions for 13 drugs by five different providers in the four months leading up to the murders, according to testimony and evidence.
Dr. Jennifer Tufts, a psychiatrist who started treating Clancy in September 2022 and prescribed her Zoloft at the time, testified that Clancy had reported on an intake form that she was having one to two drinks five times a week and that she felt guilty about it.
Clancy told the doctor about her anxiety, depression and insomnia but she denied having any suicidal or homicidal thoughts at the time and she also denied hearing any voices, Tufts testified.
She then landed in the psychiatric facility McLean Hospital in Mᴀssachusetts on Jan. 1, 2023, for suicidal thoughts about eight months after Callan’s birth.
She was released Jan. 5 — two and a half weeks before the killings and her sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt, which left her a paralyzed from the waist down.
Clancy’s lawyer has told the jury that she is not guilty, instead more so by reason of insanity due to the drugs she was on that led her to have severe postpartum psychosis.AP
Dr. Alia Goodheart told the jury about weaning Clancy off of the antipsycH๏τic drug Seroquel during her four nights at McLean in hopes of improving the struggling mom’s insomnia.
In place of Seroquel, the doctor prescribed Clancy two new medications — a 14-day supply of anti-anxiety drug Ativan and a 14-day supply of Trazodone to help her sleep, the psychiatrist told the jury.
Goodheart insisted on the stand Clancy had told her that despite her suicidal thoughts, she would never follow through on them because “of her children and her family and her mother.”
The doctor added that while Clancy reported feeling anxiety, being unable to sleep and having brain fog and suicidal ideations, the medical expert did not see any signs of psychosis in her.
Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, wants a jury to find Clancy not guilty of her children’s killings by reason of insanity on the grounds she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, partly caused by the drugs she was on.
Reddington has also said Clancy heard a voice telling her to carry out the heinous acts.
Toxicologists told jurors Clancy had two antidepressants, two anti-anxiety medications and two antipsycH๏τic drugs in her blood after the killings.
Goodheart said she would have liked some more time to observe Clancy’s sleep patterns after weaning her off of Seroquel but that Clancy insisted on checking out of McLean Jan. 5, so she could be home for the birthday of her oldest child, Cora, 5, that weekend.
Reddington questioned the fact that Goodheart took Clancy at her word for many things.
“You ever heard of patients who minimize their symptoms and lie about their symptoms?” Reddington asked.
“Yes,” Goodheart answered.
She later clarified that she considers a patient’s body language and eye contact to help her “get a sense of whether a person is being honest” — and that Clancy didn’t give the doctor reason to believe she was lying.
Clancy is accused of using exercise bands to strangle Cora, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan at her Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023. Immediately after, Clancy cut her wrists and neck and threw herself out of a second story window, partially paralyzing herself.
She now appears in court in a wheelchair.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
